For Honor team reverses plan to remove older cosmetics after fan backlash

Update, July 7: After a brief but concentrated firestorm of negative feedback, Ubisoft has reversed its decision to remove older cosmetic items from For Honor’s Heroes menu.

For Honor community manager Eric Pope took to Reddit to offer a mea culpa to players for not explaining how the team’s decision to rework the game’s cosmetic system was going to work. The idea, he said, wasn’t to pull any content out of the game, but rather to put it on a weekly, rotating schedule in order to de-clutter menus for newer players.

“[O]ur team has decided to keep the content in the game and not withdraw the items and the sale will continue as planned until July 19th,”

“Reading the various threads made us realize that we didn’t properly explain what we wanted to do and why we were doing it,” Pope wrote on the game’s subreddit Friday. “Even if we are not proceeding, we want to share the exact plan we had mind and why these changes were going to be made.”

For Honor’s summer sale will continue for the next two weeks, with up to 50% off all the items that were going into ‘rotation’ status – that’s 146 items, or 600+ if you count dupes – so you can pick up anything you’ve been holding off on buying.

Pope made the original announcement about removing Heroes menu items via Reddit, and he also provided a full list of everything that’s on sale, and how much the discount is –click hereto take a look. Highlights include 50% off 27 mythic outfits.

The sale is live now, and will run until July 19 at 12:00 UTC (05:00 Pacific).

Following the original announcement, Pope gave a brief explanation as to why Ubi made this decision, but game director Damien Kieken went into more depth in this clip from Warrior’s Den (For Honor’s weekly livestream):

Essentially, after more than a year of weekly content releases, For Honor has accumulated a huge number of items. It’s fine for veteran players, who have been able to process the content as it’s dropped, but overwhelming for newcomers, and also makes the game’s menus a pain to navigate.

The decision drew a substantially negative response. Almost all of the highest-voted replies on Reddit seem to think it’s a bad idea – the top-voted says “isn’t it kind of a waste to permanently get rid of some [of] the already amazing content? Why not just redesign the menu layout?” That’s probably easier said than done, but at least it’s constructive. The third-voted is less so, denouncing the planas “a desperate cash grab to squeeze some Steel sales out of people with the excuse of removing content from the game for no reason whatsoever.”